Paul Ohm, The Benefits of the Old Privacy: Restoring the Focus to Traditional Harm
Comment by: Bruce Boyden
PLSC 2010
Workshop draft abstract:
The rise of the Internet stoked so many new privacy fears that it inspired a wave of legal scholars to give birth to a new specialty of legal scholarship, Information Privacy law. We should both recognize this young specialty’s great successes and wonder about its frustrating shortcomings. On the one hand, it has provided a rich structure of useful and intricate taxonomies with which to analyze new privacy problems and upon which to build sweeping prescriptions for law and policy.
But why has this important structural work had so little impact on concrete law and policy reform? Has any significant new or amended law depended heavily on this impressive body of scholarship? I submit that none has, which is particularly curious given the way privacy has dominated policy debates in recent years.
In this Article, I propose a theory for why the Information Privacy law agenda has failed to provoke meaningful reform. Building on Ann Bartow’s “dead bodies” thesis, I argue that Information Privacy scholars gave up too soon on the prospect of relying on traditional privacy harms, the kind of harms embodied in the laws of harassment, blackmail, discrimination, and the traditional four privacy torts. Instead, these scholars have proposed broader theories of harm, arguing that we should worry about small incursions of privacy that aggregate across society, focusing on threats to individual autonomy, deliberative democracy, and human development, among many other values. As the symbol of these types of privacy harms, these scholars have pointed to Bentham’s and Foucault’s Panopticon.
Unfortunately, fear of the Panopticon is unlikely to drive contemporary law and policy for two reasons. First, as a matter of public choice, Panoptic fears are not the kind that spurs legislators to act. Lawmakers want to point to poster children suffering concrete, tangible harm—to Bartow’s dead bodies—before they will be motivated to act. The Panopticon provides none. Second, privacy is a relative, contingent, contextualized, and malleable value. It is weighed against other values, such as security and economic efficiency, so any theory of privacy must be presented in a commensurable way. But the Panopticon is an incommensurable fear. Even if you agree that it represents something dangerous that society must work to avoid, when you place this amorphous fear against any concrete, countervailing value, the concrete will always outweigh the vague.
I argue that we should shift our focus away from the Panopticon and back on traditional privacy harm. We should point to people who suffer tangible, measureable, harm; we should spotlight privacy’s dead bodies.
But this isn’t a call to return meekly back to the types of narrow concerns that gave rise to the traditional privacy torts. Theories of privacy harm should include not only the stories of people who already have been harmed but also rigorous predictions of new privacy harms that people will suffer because of changes to technology.
Ironically, information privacy law scholars who make these kinds of predictions will often propose prescriptions that are as broad and sweeping as some of those made by their Panopticon-driven counterparts. Traditional-harm theories of information privacy aren’t necessarily regressive forms of privacy scholarship, and this Article points to the work of a new wave of information privacy law scholars who are situated in traditional harm but at the same time offer aggressive new prescriptions. From my own work, I revisit the “database of ruin” theory, a prediction that leads to aggressive prescriptions for new privacy protections.
Finally, I argue why this predictive-traditional-harm approach is more likely to lead to political action than the Panoptic approach, recasting prescriptions from some of the classic recent works of Information Privacy into more politically saleable forms by translating them through the traditional harm lens.